ALL WE ASK

‘All We Ask’ is an exhibition presenting six young artists from Germany, who work across different media.

As the title indicates, the project asks about a common ‘generational’ denominator of their work, finding it in a frequent leitmotiv of the selected pieces, which is exploring, programming or pointing out situational models or patterns of behaviour. It is therefore no surprise that an alternative title of the exhibition was ‘The Homage To Misbehaviour’.

The authors are also linked by the School of Video of Anna Jermolaewa at HfG in Karlsruhe, in which they are participating or recently participated. It is perhaps this environment that underlies and aggregates, with its natural ease, the mentioned social, documentary or documentary-fictitious tendencies.

The installation is dominated by a surreal composition by Carmen Donet, in which two monumental objects generate an infinite tennis match. The match with its infinity symbol trajectory is in a dialogue on monumentality with the video loop ‘Suprematism’. Its author, Johannes Evers, systematically works at the transcription of existing artworks, particularly paintings, into grotesque home or family videos.

The docu-fictional position of Grazyna Roguski’s work is introduced by a project realized on the Polish side of the Germany border. In the border regions, absurd tourism has developed, based on cheap services. German families visit this area (Osinów Dolny / Niederwutzen) to get a cheap haircut, for example. Grazyna exaggerated this phenomenon by visiting countless hairdressers (existing concurrently next to each other) in two days and documenting each stage of her haircut.

Lukas Kindermann’s works are intuitive insights in formats or means of transaction or valuation. In a series of prints ‘Kleine Fische’ and ‘Grosse Fische’, he takes comically sounding ‘records’ from fishermen’s blogs and transfers them onto graph paper. All these ‘trophies’ are naturally documented in the hands of their ‘hunters’.

Cooperation with institutions, to which he comes as an observer, is a long-standing interest of Benedikt Dichgans. He records galleries’ backstage and moments that are not accessible to the general audiences, such as the different stages of exhibit installation, etc. In this exhibition, Benedikt introduces his latest series of videos documenting closing hours or, more precisely, the moment of exhibitions immersing in darkness at selected museums in Germany and Austria.

The last work presented at the exhibition, which balances out the established prudent, even critical tone, is the ‘Untitled’ by Jan Schumann. He infiltrated several DV-cassettes into exhibition video cameras in a huge shopping centre with electronics, obtaining in a few hours ‘an authentic amateur recording’, as well as spontaneous reactions and behaviour of random shoppers. In other words, a documentary lacking the documentary purpose; raw ‘found footage’.